Monday, March 26, 2018

Staunton, March 26 – Migrants from
Daghestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia are not only driving out the indigenous
Russian population of Stavropol kray but also fundamentally changing the
economic situation there, replacing relatively high-tech agriculture with more
primitive kinds, according to Yury Yefimov.

But despite that
change, he says, “before the kray today as was the case 10 to 20 years ago,
there stand serious threats which neither the authorities nor society has yet
been able to deal with,” despite intense public discussion of what scholars
call “’succession,’” the replacement of one ethnic group by another.

Most of the new migrants, Yefiimov
continues, have been coming into the eastern districts of Starvropol, both
because these adjoin the three North Caucasus republics and because local conditions
are prompting Russian agriculturalists to leave and thus allowing North
Caucasian pastoralists to take over.

The new arrivals, he says, “have won
the competition in a whole range of branches of the economy, including for
example, in trade. Moreover, the
migrants have begun to exert significant influence on the underlying
agricultural branch of the economy,” largely displacing mechanized agriculture
with sheep herding.

This process of “ethnic replacement,”
Yefimov says, “continues and will continue until two major tasks are solved” – “the
establishment on the territory of conditions for retaining the indigenous population”
and “the imposition of law and order … in the east of Stavropol and other parts
of the kray.”

“If we want that the new, already
labor migrants do not become again the cause of a deterioration of the social-economic
situation, conditions must be created for their complete integration into the
life of the region. And this also is a task in which precisely the state must
play first fiddle, with the active cooperation of civil society, of course.”